


To Hera

by lesbianbean



Category: Breaking Bad, The Godfather (1972 1974 1990), The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Character studies, Female Centric, Gen, I Don't Even Know, Internalized Misogyny, and abortion, i have a lot of feelings about the wives of troubled male antiheroes, i'm probably going to add to this, this is the result, warnings for psychological abuse/gaslighting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-14
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-10-31 14:24:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10901184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbianbean/pseuds/lesbianbean
Summary: She is vengeful and vicious. She loves fiercely. She does not suffer silently. And she refuses to be reduced to the smiling shadow at her husband's elbow.





	1. Kay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I didn't come here to see you disguised by your church.

Michael kisses her, one of his hands sliding up into her hair. It’s a grotesque parody of a lover’s caress, loving and gentle on the surface and anything but underneath. He pulls back, looks into her eyes, and she tries to see the sweet, shy soldier she fell in love with all those years ago, the boy who always held the door open for her and bought her daisies on her birthday because he knew they were her favorite. She can’t see him. She can’t see anything in his eyes but ice.

“Everything I do, Kay, I do for our family.” 

“I know, Michael.” 

“I love you, darling.” 

His hand touches her stomach where their child grows. The thought of raising it in the compound he had built made her sick. When he falls asleep, she climbs out of bed and stands in the shower until the hot water is gone and the tips of her fingers turn blue and wrinkle. She stuffs her fist in her mouth and bites down, trying to force the scream back into her body. 

I should have stayed at Dartmonth, she thinks as she watches her children play in the backyard that stretches down to the water, closely watched by men in dark suits. I could have been a secretary. I could have married Joe Reynolds, my father’s boss’s son. I could have I could have. 

Sometimes she wishes that the only thing she had to worry about were PTA meetings and Betty Crocker cakes, that Michael was a banker and he left for work every morning with a briefcase and a kiss on the cheek and took her to dinner on Fridays. She wants normalcy so badly she can almost taste it--a cookie cutter life like the ones marketed to women everywhere. If she could have it, she thinks, she’d throw herself into it completely, wrap the pearls and polyester-cotton blend around her like the security blanket she used to have. 

Other times, and this was late at night when Michael was asleep and she was watching the motion of the clouds across the inky sky, she wished that she could be on the other side of the closed door where the Corleone men met. The hunger for this strikes her suddenly and consumes her just as intently as the hunger for a suburban utopia. She’s been in the dark-paneled meeting room afterwards and smelled the smoke from their cigars. In her fantasies, she holds a cigar in one hand and a thick-bottomed glass of liquor in the other. One of the men makes a quip about something horrible and they all laugh. She makes a suggestion and Michael nods slowly, turning the idea over in his head, meeting her eyes. 

She makes wilder and wilder plans for escape, but she knows they’re as unreachable as her other fantasies. Escape for her daughter and son is even harder to imagine. But there is one thing she still has some control over. 

The doctor is kind to her as he explains the procedure and she has to fight back a hysterical laugh when she thinks: This is it. This is what my life has come to. 

She prays, although she’s not sure whether it’s the Catholic or Baptist God, or if whatever God it is will listen to her. 

She sleeps through the night for the first time she can remember, lying in the middle of the bed. She doesn't know when Michael will be back, but for the first time, she’s not afraid.


	2. Skyler

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Someone has to protect this family from the man who protects this family.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I posted this and deleted it like fifty times, and I still kind of hate it but Oh Well. tldr: I would die for Skyler White.

Skyler started looking at the pool in the evenings, holding a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The water was the most beautiful shade of blue she’d ever seen, the same color as the desert sky on the day she drove to the place where the four states met and she flipped a coin.

It’s easy for Walt. He has some kind of magic about him. Maybe it’s that he doesn't care about the consequences. Part of her is almost jealous--she wished she had the power to swagger through life assuming that you’re always right and everyone else was wrong. But she can’t forget the look in Ted’s eyes when he saw her in the hospital, or how every time she sees Hank or Marie she thinks about how the things that Walt did and she did--she did, she did, there was blood on her hands--almost killed them, could still kill them. 

Some days she leaves Flynn in charge of the car wash and drives to the library and looks up apartment buildings and job listings in Colorado. She imagines taking some of the pile of money in the storage unit, buying a used car and just going. She’d dye her hair and get contacts and leave this behind. And then she clears her browser history and walks out of the library with her sunglasses on, lighting up as soon as she’s in the safety of her car. 

He is gentle, and that scares her more than anything. It’s like lying next to a coiled spring, a poisonous snake, never knowing when he could lash out. She can never fall asleep next to him, but he gets angry if she doesn't play the role of wife, so she waits until his breathing evens and then slips out of bed and smokes cigarette after cigarette by the pool, trying to force her hands to stop shaking. He does love her, and somehow that makes his hands on her skin and his breath on the back of her neck so much worse, because if he hated her like she hated him then maybe he’d let her go. But love gives him a reason to tighten his grip on her, because he’s the hero in his mind and the hero always gets exactly what he wants, and she’s his wife and she’s supposed to suffer silently by his side while the world burns. He’s almost comically confused that she won’t do it, won’t bend to his will the way the rest of the world so easily does. 

Things had gotten worse since his birthday. Flynn does hate her. He sees her as the spoilsport to the fun that Walt brings, with his shiny cars and takeout for dinner. To him, she’s the selfish bitch who tore apart their family. It hurts, but she can handle it if it keeps him and Holly out of their house. She won’t back down when it comes to protecting them from the monster that the man she married has become. She’s not a good person, and she knows this. A good person would have called her brother-in-law the moment she knew, held her head high in the courtroom and pointed at her husband when she was asked to identify him. 

Maybe someday she’ll be able to forgive herself for staying. It felt like the best thing to do at the time, but now she can’t be sure. They eat silently and she thinks about the knives lined up in their block in the kitchen, the sharpness of a broken wineglass, the hundreds of other ways she could end this, leave the devil bleeding out on the floor. 

She can’t do it. Every time she looks at Marie and opens her mouth to tell her, or reaches to turn off the turn signal as she comes up on their driveway, or grips the stem of her wineglass while staring at Walt across their dinner table, something stops her. Things can’t go on the way they are, she knows that, but she feels like doing anything would push her world entirely off the edge of a cliff. 

The pool sparkles and she exhales a slow stream of smoke towards the full moon.


	3. Lori

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Oh, I'm a girl. You talk to him."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tw: sexual assault, internalized misogyny and victim-blaming.

Every Halloween, Lori was a different Disney princess. Their family didn’t always have the money to buy the costumes that the mall sold--bright and colorful with hard plastic packs of accessories--but her mother was good with a sewing machine and the craft books that came in the mail.

One night, as they watched Sleeping Beauty for the twentieth time, a question popped into Lori’s seven-year-old head. 

“Mommy, why does the prince always save the princess?” 

“What do you mean, sweetheart?” 

“I mean, in all these movies, the prince is the one who saves the princess. It’s never the other way around. Why?” 

Lori’s mother closed the magazine she was reading and turned it over in her hands for a few moments before answering. 

“You know how Daddy goes out to work every day and Mommy stays home and takes care of the house? It’s like that. Women are just naturally better at some things, and men are better at others." 

Lori puts her mother in a box with everything else--their little cape cod with a vegetable garden, her weekly book club. She pushes the box into the darkest corner of her mind and tries to move forward. She hopes that her mother at least got a painless death. 

Atlanta gets firebombed and Shane rushes them off the road as the highway descends into chaos. She waits until Carl is asleep to break down, and he holds her. 

It’s not the first time they’ve been together. Two weeks after Rick’s accident, he brought over a case of her favorite beer and they talked late into the night about him. She’d had three beers when their mouths collided and she was pulling off his uniform. It was dark in the living room, and she could almost pretend his hands were Rick’s. Shane had seemed so broken, and when she dragged him out to her favorite coffee shop to talk about it three days later, they both rationalized it as them missing him. It made sense--they were the two people who knew him best in the world. 

Of course, that wasn’t the whole story. It didn’t explain the way he watched her when he was over for dinner, or the times she’d called him when the postpartum depression was bad or she’d had a fight with Rick. She loved Rick, she did, but everything was hard with him. With Shane, she always knew where she stood. He never made crazy decisions, like rushing to Atlanta to save a complete stranger. Shane would always put her and Carl first, over heroism and the greater good and preserving civilization. She wanted to believe that she cared about those things, but sometimes you just needed to think about yourself in the apocalypse, which Rick didn’t seem to understand. 

It’s bad, no matter how many ways she tries to rationalize it to herself, lying in the sleeping bag next to her husband. It’s bad even if she thought he was dead, if she trusted Shane completely when he came back from the hospital splattered with blood and shook his head grimly. 

It’s really bad that some dark, awful part of her secretly enjoys watching them glare at each other over her, flex their muscles and compete over her, like she was Queen Guinevere. At least at first, before the CDC. 

When she was in ninth grade, the star football player took her to the homecoming dance. She spent hours curling her hair and sewed her own dress, and he was a perfect gentleman until halfway back to her house. He locked the car doors. She never told anyone about it. The night Shane comes to her, drunk and angry and violent, it's like she can hear her fifteen-year-old self screaming in the back of her head. When she'd finished throwing up, she stared at her ashen reflection in the mirror and concluded that it was her fault, it had to be, because the Shane she knew wouldn't have done that to her. She led him on, after all, flirted with him, didn't shut it all down when she had the chance. Like a slut. Like the girls her mother used to sneer at on the evening news. 

Everyone has nightmares post-apocalypse, but after the CDC, she doesn't have them about walkers anymore. Shane starts showing up more and more often when she closes her eyes. Sometimes he kills Rick and makes her watch. Other times his hands are around her throat and she desperately tries to make him stop but he doesn't listen. She wishes she could tell someone--Andrea, Carol, Jacqui, anyone--but she knows what Rick would do, if he knew. Besides, one of them might tell her what she keeps telling herself--that she deserves it. 

My hands are clean, Rick says--shouts--as the group stares at him. She doesn't recognize him. Carl looks terrified, and so much older than a boy his age should look. Her son, the little boy who always snuck cookie dough out of the bowl and cried when the hunter shot Bambi. In this moment, she’s more terrified than she was when she saw the herd bearing down on their house She presses her face into her balled-up jacket and tries to shut it all out, because that’s all she can do now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, guess who started watching The Walking Dead? Me. I did. It's a frustrating show, but they do create some got dang interesting characters. I basically wrote this because Lori was so frustrating and I wanted to understand her better. I don't know if we'd be friends, but it was fun to write this.  
> I've started a piece about Michonne too, which I should have up soon. She's definitely the most interesting character on the show, and I think she and Rick have one of the best on-screen dynamics. But in the meantime, enjoy my essay about gender dynamics disguised as a Lori character study!


End file.
